Aside from gleeful goading, Cooper's piece isn't quite the no-holds-barred takedown one might have hoped. But as ever, the reactionary music fans' kneejerk defence of their sacred cow was even less edifying. It's as though they expect today's teenagers to validate their parents' radical youth by obediently following the set texts. It's particularly amusing, of course, that this kerfuffle should have sprung up around Public "Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me" Enemy: Chuck D grasped the irony of the situation more readily than the fans defending his honour when he tweeted: "Haha he was hatched to wreak havoc because I too talked of Elvis & John Wayne as if their works were futile."

The canon is a conservative concept that has squatted, toad-like, on music criticism for as long as I can remember – not just in the form of "100 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die" space-filler lists, but in the reinforcement of received wisdom. The power of that oft-quoted Public Enemy lyric was its underlying racial charge, so it's not exactly equivalent to a young white boy's dilettantism – but it's just as important to remember that the popular music canon, as it has been formed over the years and continues to be formed right now, is itself both heavily gendered and racialised: it's a reflection of the tastes of the straight, white, educated men who have dominated music criticism. Take, for example, how Public Enemy themselves – angry, political, serious, masculine – have, as one of the token few hip-hop acts permitted within the rock canon, been used as a stick with which to beat the rest of the genre: the lyrics are too ignorant, the beats are too danceable, the hooks are too catchy and so on.

Underlying the primacy of the canon is perhaps the most damaging, insidious assumption of all: the belief that an objective response to art is possible in the first place. It's a belief that stifles honesty: witness the widespread dismissal of Cooper as a troll rather than engaging with his piece as a reflection of how he actually responded to Public Enemy. And witness how many of the more paternalistic responses, such as Questlove's, emphasised the necessity of gaining "objective" knowledge about the context of the album – as though this has anything to do with the kind of music one is naturally drawn to. Knowledge is a wonderful thing – but age also teaches you that knowledge, specifically knowledge about the impossibility of ever achieving full knowledge, is a thing that can weigh you down as well as illuminate. Nineteen-year-olds would be well advised to take advantage of their temporary freedom from this to mouth off as loudly and as often as they wish.

Throughout my own music listening history, few experiences have been as dispiriting as the brief period when, as a 19-year-old, I conscientiously attempted to plough through several "classic albums", even reading up on them in the vain hope that this information would make the dreary music coming out of my speakers suddenly click in my brain. None of it ever seemed as vibrantly, vitally alive as the music I was actually thrilled by at the time. Indeed, one glaring contrast was between the Technicolor, booty-shaking, charisma of the gloriously filthy Miami rapper Trina and the hectoring, drab production of Public Enemy; an article my younger self wrote arguing for her superiority over them is sadly lost in the wreckage of ancient hard-drive deaths, but I'd still stand by every word. A common response to Cooper has been the sad shake of the head, and the warning that in a few years' time he'll regret his callow words. I hope he doesn't – and in the meantime, I hope to see many more young music writers who don't give the tiniest damn about what the music establishment tells them to listen to. What every "classic album" out there needs more than anything else is to be eviscerated by a 19-year-old intern to whom it means absolutely nothing.